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It seems like just yesterday when the cloud skeptics were out in force, saying things like this, “The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is [cloud]? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”

That’s Larry Ellison’s famous rant, and he certainly wasn’t alone in his skepticism.

We’ve seen this all before with the Internet

From where I’m sitting, the evolution of the cloud reminds me a lot of the Internet itself. Back in the mid-90s, the Internet was borderline useless for most people. There were no decent search engines, just aggregators that sorted popular sites into major categories like “sports” or “news,” and no decent mail clients, just so-so services from the likes of AOL and Prodigy.

In fact, back in 1998, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, who is right more often than not, famously whiffed on the future impact of the Internet, saying, “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.”

That prediction certainly didn’t pan out.

Similarly, the cloud has quickly gone from a novel and somewhat risky technology to a mainstream one in record time.

Case in point: Remember not that long ago when everyone wondered what it would take for smartphones and then tablets to ever take off? Well, it took the cloud. There were other factors too, of course, such as improved networks, cheaper processors, etc. -- but these other things were known factors. The cloud was the critical, much-needed wild card.

In fact, I believe that the cloud has already become a foundational technology. Cloud-delivered services are powering Big Data, mobile banking, social media, the Internet of Things, M2M, etc.

When the Internet went from being just another communications option to a foundational technology, the nature of business and the economy radically changed. We shop, bank, and find dates on the Internet. We use email more than snail mail, and many people (knowledge workers) do nearly all of their work online.

Now, the cloud is replacing hard drives; cloud music services have displaced MP3 players, and can you even remember life before Netflix? The horror.

“We recently saw a major tipping point for the cloud,” said Tom Lounibos, CEO of SOASTA, a cloud testing company. “When the CIA awarded Amazon a $600 million cloud contract, it really proved that the cloud had become the future of computing.”

Lounibos also pointed to something else we should watch for if we need more evidence of the cloud’s importance: “Just before the iPhone 6 is released, do you know what the carriers will do? Every single one will set up a pre-order site, and those sites will be in the cloud.”

The advantage here is obvious. You can throw up a site like that whenever you want, scale it up with demand, scale it back down as demand tapers off – all on the fly.

Mobile game developer considers cloud a game-changer

Mobile game developer Phyken Media, creator of the popular Wizard Ops Tactics title, relies on the cloud to let players challenge each other, regardless of where they are located in the world.

The standard method for playing others online is to choose (or allow the game to choose) a particular server near you, and then you can challenge other people using that server. If you have a friend or relative living across the country or on another continent, you’re out of luck.

“We wanted to create one unified pool of players, with players not knowing or caring about which server they were on, and the only way we could do that is through the cloud,” said Kunal Patel, CEO of Phyken Media.

Phyken recently adopted GenieDB’sMySQL Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS). The service helped Phyken meet the demands of a growing player base (up 30 percent this year), as well as user demands for high availability. Phyken says that GenieDB is ideal for gaming platforms because it delivers fast performance, no latency or downtime, and master-master replication with auto-healing and conflict resolution – all within a native MySQL environment.

The complexity of setting something like that up can’t be understated, but for Phyken, they now just get to hand those headaches off to a service provider.

I should point out here that Wizard Ops Tactics is a turn-based game. The solution wouldn’t enable simultaneous gaming due to latency issues over the WAN and the speed limit posed by the speed of light, but, who knows, perhaps cloud-driven predictive analytics could even overcome those obstacles.

No office, no tech infrastructure, no problem

Not that long ago, the path to success for a new tech startup was pretty well mapped out: secure angel funding, create an alpha product or service, find VCs and eventually release a product or service. Then, you figured out an exit, failed, or, much less frequently, turned into a viable standalone company.